CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Retired Captain Carl Dennison’s Lincoln Park home was modest compared to many of the mansions occupying the wealthy North Side community, but still the nicest house Kate had seen here save for Derek Hammond’s lakefront mansion.
A massive elm tree dominated the spacious front yard, and a brick planter sported a selection of summer annuals.
Most of the plants were clinging to the edge of life, and some flowers had already browned and shriveled from neglect.
Kate wondered at that as Whitaker led her and Marcus past the cluster of officers gathered on the porch.
Kate stopped when she saw the hysterical woman screaming in the center of a group of uniforms. Whitaker frowned, and the officers around her closed in protectively, sensing her presence before even looking at her.
“Hey, now’s not the best time,” Whitaker said. “She’s in shock.”
“I just need a minute,” Kate said.
“Seriously,” Whitaker replied firmly. “Not now.”
Kate met his eyes and calmly reminded him, “This is now officially a spree killing. Three victims in four days. I’m going to talk to the daughter.”
Whitaker glanced at her, then back at Kate. “Can you have a little human decency, please? She just lost her mother last winter and now her father.”
“I’m having human decency. I’m trying to find the person who killed her father before they take another life.”
She pushed through the uniforms without waiting for a response.
A plainly built woman in her late thirties with straight brown hair and long bangs looked up.
Her eyes were red and puffy, and seeing the naked anguish in her face, Kate almost thought better of her insistence on interviewing her before Laura said, “It’s because of Steven Friar, isn’t it? That’s why the killer did this.”
The officers closed around her again. “Laura, let’s go home,” one of them said. He glared at Kate and added, “You can talk to the FBI when you feel ready.”
“No, I’d like to talk to her now,” Kate said firmly. “Who is Steven Friar?”
“Bullshit, that’s who,” another uniform growled.
Kate was nearing the end of her patience, but getting confrontational wouldn’t help her right now. “Miss Dennison, would you like to speak with me?”
“You don’t have to,” one of the officers reminded her almost desperately.
“No, I do,” Laura said. She squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and nodded. “I do.”
The officers were clearly unhappy with this, and a moment later, Kate knew why.
“My father was accused of shooting an unarmed suspect during an arrest seventeen years ago. He was a Detective Sergeant at the time investigating a domestic abuse case. Steven Friar was the suspect. He fled his home when Dad showed up to arrest him. Dad chased him into an alley. There was a confrontation, and it ended with Dad shooting him in the chest. He died in the hospital nine days later.”
The officers around Laura were all looking away.
Whitaker scowled at the ground. The others tried not to let their anger show, but it was clear their feelings toward Laura had cooled noticeably with this admission.
Kate stifled the bubbling contempt rising to the surface.
The thin blue line had strangled justice too many times to count, but officers still treated it like a religious mandate.
You don’t turn on your own. You back them up, no matter what.
She wondered if that was what happened here. “Was there an investigation?” Kate asked.
“Special Agent, I’ll get you the files,” Whitaker said curtly. “Leave her alone, yeah?”
Marcus laid a heavy paw on Whitaker’s shoulder and said without a trace of threat, “Let my partner do her job, and let’s go check out the scene.”
Whitaker gave Laura a hard look, and Kate made sure the woman saw her give Whitaker an equally hard one right back.
In the end, it was Laura’s anguish that broke the detective, not Kate’s pressure or Marcus’s coaxing.
He sighed and lowered his eyes. “Yeah, let’s do that.
Sorry. Denny was a mentor of mine. I’m just not in a good mindset right now.
I might have to give someone else this case. ”
“I can look at the scene myself if you want,” Marcus said. “You don’t have to be here. We’ve got this.”
Kate noted genuine sympathy in her partner’s voice. She glanced at him and saw more grief than the scene called for. More personal grief. Maybe he’d lost mentors too and understood what Whitaker was going through.
Whitaker nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Sorry, guys.”
A few of the uniforms murmured sympathies. The glances Kate received were still cold, but Marcus got a few nods of respect as he entered the house.
Kate turned back to Laura. She was calmer now, still sniffling but with the edges of her grief dulled somewhat.
That would ebb and flow for a while. There would be periods of debilitating pain that would manifest with physical symptoms at their harshest. This would be followed by long stretches of hazy confusion, in turn interrupted by moments of manic activity.
For Kate, this had been investigation into her father’s murder, misguided and ultimately fruitless, but energetic.
For Laura, this might be deep cleaning her house or going on a long jog or an intense workout session.
It was the mind’s way of coping with the unacceptable.
“Internal Affairs determined that Dad had reason to believe that Friar was armed. He was reaching into his pocket, and he was ignoring Dad’s instructions.
They suspended him with pay for the duration of a mandatory psychological evaluation which concluded that he was fit to return to service.
The DA’s office declined to press charges. ”
Her response had the air of a recitation. Kate wondered how many times she’d repeated these words to herself over the years, each time her eyes drifted to the corners and wondered what crawling things lurked in those shadows.
“Did others feel differently?”
Laura scoffed. “Of course they did. He was a cop. Everyone wants to believe that cops are killers.”
The uniforms gathered on the porch muttered agreement.
“Did anything come of that?” Kate asked.
Larua took a deep breath and released it in a shaky sigh. Her eyes were glazing over as she settled into the first trough of depression that would follow her for months if not years. “His family sued. Dad settled out of court for twelve thousand, I think, enough to cover his burial fees.”
“And were they satisfied with that?”
“Of course not. Their loved one was dead. It didn’t matter who was at fault. They just wanted someone to go down for it.”
Kate made a mental note to check up on Steven Friar’s family. She only had one more question for Laura. “You said Friar was reaching into his pocket. Was he reaching for anything in particular?”
One of the uniforms shifted his feet and pressed his lips together. He kept his eyes firmly on the ground, but the tension in his body told Kate he knew the answer.
Laura took another breath and deflated as she released it. In a soft voice, barely audible, she replied, “An inhaler.”
Kate nodded. “All right. Thank you, Laura. I’m sorry for your loss.”
She joined Marcus inside while the uniforms led Laura away.
A few more cops were inside, staring around at the stained clothes, empty takeout boxes, and half-crushed beer cans littering the home.
Their pained expressions spoke volumes. No doubt they had all remembered Dennison as a great leader.
Seeing him reduced to this state and knowing how he ended was a hard thing to come to terms with.
The scene was much the same as the others except that Dennison sat at the table. To reach him, the killer would have had to either move him after they killed him or come up behind him and reached around to stab him.
Marcus confirmed it was the latter. “Angle of the wound is different. Missed the heart, it looks like, but considering the blood loss, I’d say the knife probably tore up every artery within an inch of it. He would have died almost as fast as the others.”
Kate glanced at the wispy gray hair and the expansive bald spot facing directly up into the dim light of a nearly burnt-out halogen bulb.
Of all their victims so far, Carl Dennison looked the most harmless.
Maybe he’d once been a scion of the law, but now he was just an old man, tired and grieving his wife.
Six more months probably would have accomplished what the killer had done that afternoon.
Her eyes fell to the table. Another inscription was there, shorter than the others. The characters were more wavery too and nicks were scattered among the letters where the killer’s knife had skipped.
The killer was nearing the end of their task. The culmination was approaching, and either zeal or fear or some combination of both had unsteadied their hand.
Kate felt a disturbing tug. In the past, these culminations had been connected to her somehow, either spiritually or tangibly.
Thus far, there had been no obvious connection to her life, no hints, no breadcrumbs from Cox to lead her to some revelation about her past. That should have been a relief, but instead it worried her.
Either she was missing something obvious, or this really wasn’t a Lawgiver case, and the killer’s obsession with commandments was incidental.
Or Cox’s poison had spread far enough that others would carry on his mission even without his leadership.
None of those options were good. And all Kate could do was follow the evidence where it led and hope that nothing fell by the wayside that she needed in order to solve this case.
As she took pictures of the cipher, Marcus said, “We should use Hartwell’s and Whitmore’s research to find other possible victims and warn them. Maybe offer police protection, but that’s going to be up to PD, and I don’t know how excited they’re gonna be about protecting acquitted killers.”
“Alleged killers,” Kate reminded him.
“Fair enough and also not the point.”
“Do it,” Kate said. “Call them and tell them to take steps to protect themselves. Bring it up to PD and see what they say. At the very least, maybe they can all take a weekend trip to the West Coast while we figure out what’s going on here.”
“Yeah.” He frowned at Dennison’s body. “You think he did it?”
“Looks that way, I’m afraid. Guy reached for an inhaler, Dennison said it was a gun. Might have thought it was a hideaway, but he definitely twisted things after the fact to make the accident more justified.”
Marcus sighed. “Yeah. Shit. I was hoping that wasn’t it.”
Kate glanced at him to see the same grief on his face he’d shown in front of Whitaker earlier. “Everything okay?”
A wall clicked over him like a camera shutter. He gave her a quick smile. “Yeah, fine. I’ll go get started on those calls.”
He left the house, leaving Kate alone with the dead body of a cop who might have been crooked or who might have just made an unfortunate mistake at an unfortunate time.
Whether crooked or unfortunate, Kate knew one thing for sure. The wrong done Steven Friar’s family and the wrong done Carl Dennison’s daughter didn’t make anything right.